I upgraded to 11.10 and lost power during the upgrade. After bringing the box back up, I attempted to continue the upgrade and at one point did a partial upgrade to resolved dependency issues that I thought at the time were related to may failed upgrade. Now I have a working system for the most part. The problem is I can not install the 'acroread' package anymore because of dependency errors:

~ $ sudo apt-get install acroread
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
acroread : Depends: nspluginwrapper but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
~ $ sudo apt-get install nspluginwrapper
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
nspluginwrapper : Depends: nspluginviewer (= 1.4.4-0ubuntu3)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
~ $ sudo apt-get install nspluginviewer

R

eading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
nspluginviewer:i386 : Depends: libgtk2.0-0:i386 (>= 2.8.0) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I am running 64-bit but it seems acroread needs some 32-bit libraries that are not able to be installed. In my reading, I've found that there were some changes to multi-arch packages.

Does anyone know how I can repair my system to get around this problem?

5 Answers
5

Try sudo apt-get install -f. It will probably give some suggestions about removing and installing packages, do what seems reasonable. If that doesn't help, try booting into recovery mode and choosing the "fix broken packages". If that doesn't work... I don't know, I'd reinstall Ubuntu if I were you. (This is a good reason to always have /home on a separate partition!)

The following packages have unmet dependencies: ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 : Depends: libcups2:i386 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libcupsimage2:i386 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libcurl3:i386 but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. Looks like my system is hosed.
–
Matt HulseNov 7 '11 at 21:30

Digging this up since I found this topic while looking for the same answer. The following fixed it for me, and seemed to be the result of manually installing a newer version of CUPS (trying to get airprint to work -- no luck there either -- which removed acroread) :

if you have not already done it, install Synaptic from the Software Center

The problem may possibly come back later unless you also Lock Version of libcups2 in Synaptic after you did the Force Version of libcups2 in Synaptic.
–
karelAug 13 '13 at 13:16

Good point, though I had some hopes that the issue was a uer-caused one that wouldn't be affected by an official in-line version update (rather I broke it myself, it shouldn't break on its own). Since I can't add comments to the answer below yet... @matt-hulse I too tried the multiarch solution with high hopes and it did nothing. Any luck with the method in my answer?
–
Jonathan CarrollAug 15 '13 at 11:52

Personal experience. I was looking around to find a solution for the same problem I had. Just out of curiosity I did what I have wrote here and it solved the problem spectacularly. Not even it solved the dependencies problem it even downgraded some packages to match the prerequisites of the package I was going to install. Aptitude command is not going to give up on your request easily and tries to solve the problem more responsibly. Just give it a shot and you'll find out
–
MeytiSep 4 '13 at 18:33